Gates’s ongoing Civil Tapestries series, begun in 2011, are made with strips of decommissioned fire hoses sewn together. The works presented here are from a new body of work called A New America. The history of the rugged fabric draws attention to the use of hoses against Black people during the struggle for civil rights, perhaps most notably in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The series pays tribute to the suffering of those on the front lines of the long campaign for equality, and offers meditative resolve to all those still bearing the burden of the march towards racial justice in America.

At the same time, and consistent with the artist’s larger interest in reenvisioning political markers within cultural history, the impact of the Civil Tapestries extends beyond their immediate and grave historical status to renegotiate art historial ideology:

“A signature of Gates’ works is his ability to embrace the hybridity of cultural signifiers… He moves between the powerful historical referent that is often part of the weightiness of black history, and a formal reference that is more often than not part of a mostly white art history. Through this interchange, the two become inextricably braided, complicit with one another.”[ii]

Painting, 2017-20 is related to Gates's Ground Rules series, in which he continues his twinned dialogue using historically weighty materials in relation to the history of painting. In this series, his compositions are made up of floor-boards that are salvaged from high school gymnasiums decommissioned by the City of Chicago. The gym floors largely come from schools in the city’s most socioeconomically disenfranchised neighborhoods, which Gates views as a direct index of the systemic oppression of the Black community. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, which houses a work from the series in its collection, addresses this unmistakable reality in its contextualization of the work:

"For Gates, the rules represented by the athletic markings on a gym floor are a crucial way in which children learn a larger social order; a lack of access to gyms [and schools for that matter] becomes, over time, a lack of understanding of the rules both big and small.”[iii]

In this series, Gates preserves the floors and subjects them to a new order rearranging the planks, flecked with color, to be in dialogue with the lightness of geometric abstraction. In relating Gates’s broader practice to W.E.B Du Bois’s concept of "double-consciousness," art historian Lisa Yun Lee notes, “The art lives ‘betwixt and between’ in both black and white worlds. This ‘two-ness’ troubles any stable or easy meaning, which propels the restlessness of the work.”[iv]

In his ceramics studio, Gates also looks to Hamada, a leading figure of the Japanese folk-craft movement Mingei that celebrated the simplicity and utility of quotidian objects, including those created by unknown makers. Hamada’s insistence on using materials sourced locally near his workshop in Mashiko—not just clay, but even his glazing brushes made from dog hair and bamboo—resonates with Gates’s reclaiming and repurposing materials throughout each facet of his practice. [vii]

Gates’s ceramics practice exists as an amalgamation of these two guides—one, in appreciation of the austere, almost anonymous aesthetic of utilitarian wares, and the other, as an overtly political and liberating statement of Black craftsmanship and autonomy of labor.

Rubber, tar, and tarpaper are familiar materials to Gates, and he uses them throughout his practice in diverse ways, sometimes additive to his sculpture but also as the primary materials of his works. Gates inherited both the skills to work with these materials and, in a less literal sense, the materials themselves from his father, a builder and roofer by trade. The painting, Highway with Mountain, is part of a series in which Gates deploys and elevates the craft of roofing, placing it in critical conversation with modernist and abstract art histories.

As the artist states “Tar was my first true material and roofing my first vocation. Maybe there is a way that I can use roofing as a parallel to other forms of craftsmanship. Artists such as Henry Moore or Richard Serra know metal very well, they understand casting. Before they were fancy, they were in their studios working with the metal, first making smaller objects, and then thinking conceptually, and then making more elegant works. I entered art through roofing.”[ix]